Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a preacher and the preeminent leader of a movement that continues to transform America and the world. King was one of the twentieth century's most influential man and lived one of its most extraordinary lives.

One of the most visible advocates of nonviolence and a direct action as methods of social change, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929. As the grandson of the Reverend A.D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church and a founder of Atlanta's NAACP chapter, and the son of Martin Luther King, Sr., who succeeded Williams as Ebenezer's pastor, King's roots were in the African-American Baptist church. After attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, King went on to study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and Boston University, where he deepened his understanding of theological scholarship and explored Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent strategy for social change. King married Coretta Scott in 1953, and the following year he accepted the pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgom

On December 5, 1955, after a Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks refused to comply with Montgomery's segregation policy on buses, the Black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King president of the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association. The boycott continued throughout 1956 and King gained a national prominence for his role in the campaign. In December 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court declared by 9 to 0 ruling Alabama's segregation laws unconstitutional and Montgomery buses were desegregated. The roots of the bus boycott in Montgomery began years before Rosa Parks' arrest. The Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of Black professionals founded in 1946, had turned their attention to Jim Crow practices on the Montgomery city buses in 1953. In a meeting with Mayor W.A. Gayle in March 1954, the Council's members outlined their wishes: a city law that would make it possible for blacks to sit from back toward front and whites from front toward back until the bus was filled, a decree that black individuals not be made to pay at the front of the bus but go to the rear to enter, and a promise that buses stop at every corner in black residential areas as they did in white communities. When little resulted from this meeting, WPC’s President Jo Ann Robinson reiterated the Council's requests in a May 21 letter to Mayor Gayle, asking him, "Please consider this plan, and if possible, act favorably upon it, for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our buses." jjjjjOn December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move after the bus driver demanded that she give her seat to a white man, resulting in her arrest. Robinson and the WPC responded by calling for a one-day protest of the city's buses on December 5. They prepared a series of leaflets at Alabama State College and organized groups to distribute them throughout the black community. Edgar Daniel Nixon, then leader of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), spoke with Parks, telling her that hers was the case that would launch a massive boycott. She agreed, and on December 5, 90% of Montgomery's Blacks stayed off the buses. Following the initial success, Nixon and Robinson arranged a meeting with the city's ministers to discuss the possibility of extending the boycott to a long-term campaign. During this meeting, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed and King, Jr., a young minister new to Montgomery, was named President. Parks recalls, "The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn't been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies." The MIA voted to continue the boycott and issued a formal list of demands: courteous treatment by the bus operator; first-come, first-serve seating for all, with blacks seating from the rear and whites from the front; and black bus operators on predominately black routes. At the first meeting of the MIA, King said to the Black community, "I want to say that in all of our actions we must stick together. Unity is the great need of the hour, and if we are united we can get many of the things that we not only desire but which we justly deserve." As Blacks remained off of the buses through 1956, city officials and whites responded with hope of defeating the boycott. Black taxi drivers were penalized if they charged less than forty-five cents, as they had begun charging ten cents-the regular bus fare-in support of the boycott. Both King's and Ralph Abernathy's homes were bombed and the membership of the local White Citizen's Council doubled. City officials obtained injunctions against the boycott in February 1956 and arrested 156 protesters under a 1921 law prohibiting the hindrance of a bus. King was triled and convicted on the charge and ordered to pay $1,000 or serve 386 days in jail. Under increasin

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